Marilyn Myller, a short film by stop-motion animator Mikey Please, is about the agonizing effort to recreate artistic success. It was made, not coincidentally, while Please was in a Tokyo hotel room plotting his follow up film to The Eagleman Stag, for which he won a BAFTA award in 2011.
Please began making stop-motion films as a kid, before honing his craft at the Royal College of Art in London. Like most other stop-motion animators, Please spent much of his career building his painstakingly-crafted sets out of foam latex. The material, which starts as a liquid and then has to be molded into shape, is used for most prosthetics or masks in film. It’s the standard way of doing things, but according to Please, it can also be a total headache: “Say you wanted to make an arm or something,” he says. “You would model it, sculpt it, set the mold, lay an armature inside the mold, clean up the cast, and then maybe it’s gone wrong. It could take days to make one really simple thing.”
Then by chance, while working on set for The Eagleman Stag, Please got stressed and started squeezing a cushion built into the green screen, like a makeshift stress ball. After thinking, “God what is this stuff?” Please cut out a chunk, took it to an upholsterer, and ended up with a huge amount of the material that isn’t exactly the same texture as a styrofoam cup, but is “in the styrofoam family.” Rather than pouring liquid material into a mold, Please simply whittles and sculpts his pieces, and it’s how he created most of the set pieces for Marilyn Myller. “It’s really direct and much more fluid,” he says. “You’re starting with a block like a block of marble and carving into it.” Given that Please sets up about 15 frames per second of footage, and can spend an entire day shooting to capture only one second of film, that fluidity is a very, very good thing.
In an industry that seems to crank out CGI-ified blockbusters every week, there’s a resurgent appreciation for handcrafted work like Please’s. Disney Animation’s 2012 short film Paperman, for instance, was made with software that layers hand-drawn frames over computer-generated ones. Likewise, Please’s styrofoam pieces have an ethereal physicality to them, from the way they catch light to the slight, inevitable ridges in the material’s surface. “Animation can be totally alien,” he says. With this, “you can kind of see the process in it, how it actually came to be. It brings you closer to film. It’s a bridge between the audience and the maker.”
source: wired.com By Margaret Rhodes
In an industry that seems to crank out CGI-ified blockbusters every week, there’s a resurgent appreciation for handcrafted work like Please’s. Disney Animation’s 2012 short film Paperman, for instance, was made with software that layers hand-drawn frames over computer-generated ones. Likewise, Please’s styrofoam pieces have an ethereal physicality to them, from the way they catch light to the slight, inevitable ridges in the material’s surface. “Animation can be totally alien,” he says. With this, “you can kind of see the process in it, how it actually came to be. It brings you closer to film. It’s a bridge between the audience and the maker.”
source: wired.com By Margaret Rhodes
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